Cons

Bottom Line

The online-based Podio straddles two lines, online project management and business social network, with alacrity.
It's one of the most comprehensive tools for small business communication and work management you'll find.

17 Dec 2015Jill Duffy

Figuring out how to enable people in a business to both communicate and get work done is no small feat. Many organizations use a combination of email, chat apps, a server for sharing documents, and perhaps even a project management tool. But why use all those separate pieces when an online collaboration platform can do it all? Podio is the best workplace collaboration tool I've tested, and it's a PCMag Editors' Choice. It's flexible, with an apps marketplace full of modules that can help a business in all kinds of ways, from sales to human resources to project management. You can add apps for practically any business need, or you can build your own. Podio is highly flexible and customizable, and it scales easily as an organization grows.

Pricing and Plans Podio charges $9, $14, and $24 per user per month for its three basic tiers of service; the link shows a chart comparing which features are included at the various tiers. Those prices are for month-to-month plans, and you can get a discount if you sign up for an annual plan.

Podio offers a free account, but it lacks user management features and is a little too lightweight to get a real sense of what the tool can do. There's also an Enterprise plan, which has custom pricing.

As a point of comparison, Igloo, which is quite similar to Podio, offers two options: an intranet for $12 per user per month and an extranet, which has variable pricing. The difference between the intranet and extranet accounts is in who uses them and how often. The intranet option is an internal, private platform used exclusively by employees inside a company. The extranet option supports similar workflows, but it's designed for people outside a company. On average, the extranet package costs around $3 per user per month. As you might have gathered, Igloo is better suited to enterprise-size organizations than small to mid-size businesses.

Another work management platform designed more for enterprises than small businesses, called Workfront, costs about $30 per user per month. The exact cost can fluctuate depending on the number of users in different role types.

Sometimes SMBs don't want to commit to a full-scale online collaboration tool and instead just want to adopt one part of it, say, a communication app. In that case, Slack or HipChat is probably the way to go. Slack is free to use for as many users as you want, but, at the free level, it only indexes and archives 10,000 messages and supports only five integrations with other services. A Standard or Plus account, $8 or $15 per user per month, billed monthly, gets rid of those limitations. HipChat, made by Atlassian, also offers a free tier, but it caps your message history at 25,000 and storage at 5GB. A paid account with HipChat is just $2 per user per month.

Sometimes decision-makers who are shopping around for online collaboration tools are really interested in project management solutions but are curious how much more it will costs to get additional features in one place, the way you do with Podio. So let's consider two examples.

Project management app Zoho Projects, for example, costs $40 per month for 50 projects and 15GB storage space, regardless of how many people are on board. Teamwork Projects offers a $49 per month plan that comes with support for 40 projects and 20GB of space. For roughly the same price, you could have four or five team members in a Basic Podio account.

Features and Friendliness The best way to describe Podio is say it's something like a social network, in which different people have their own accounts that are unique to them. Then there are workspaces, which are customizable for different groups. Every workspace can have an array of apps added to it that help the group members collaborate and get work done in different ways.

All the tools you'd expect to see in a social network, such as a chat app and direct messaging, are at your fingertips. Likewise, you can look at any user profile to learn more about the person, such as title and contact information.

Podio's apps are a big part of what makes the service so much better than most other workplace management tools, for several reasons.

First of all, they're easy to find. They're housed in an Apps Marketplace, organized by the type of business at hand, such as Business Development, Sales and CRM, PR and Communication, and Software Development. When you select any of these business needs, Podio shows you relevant packs of apps to install. For example, under Events Management, the first suggested app pack contains apps called Participants, Venues, Suppliers, Speakers, Events, and Guest List. Another featured app pack is more specifically for Conference Management.

Second, the apps themselves are highly customizable, and dead simple to customize, at that. After you click to install an app, Podio gives you WYSIWYG tools for adding, removing, or rearranging components within the app. Podio is as easy to use as Squarespace in this regard.

Third, if you can't find an app that you need, you can always build your own using tools that Podio provides. Podio gives you templates and fields that you can drag and drop into place to make an app. Developers can also tap into the Podio API to set up custom integrations.

Finally, other Podio users can comment on apps and give them a star rating. The community is pretty active. When one user asks a question, another often answers. The community contributes quite a bit to the user-friendliness of the tool.

As easy as Podio is to set up and customize, a business decision-maker could easily sink a lot of time into trying to get Podio just right, to find a balance between having too many apps and too few. Igloo is the complete opposite. Within the first five minutes of setting up an Igloo account, I felt like I had figured out at least 80 percent of the platform. If speed is what you need, Igloo gets it done. The layout makes sense. Navigating the site is a piece of cake. It's not the slickest site I've ever seen, but it's functional, simple, and clear. That said, Podio is the better tool in the long run, especially for SMBs.

Special Features When it comes down to actually getting work done, users have the power to assign tasks and responsibilities to other users, add deadlines for tasks, and handle other things that are typical in work management setups. You'll find a calendar, of course, a feed of recent updates and activity concerning your teams, and even a customizable homepage for each workspace on which you can add, remove, rearrange, and even resize different widgets that provide information about the team and its status.

Beyond the basics, there is really handy support via webforms, so you can collect information from customers or people who are interested in your organization and have their submissions feed back into Podio. New contact management tools also help streamline information about people across workspaces.

There isn't a timer tool, unfortunately, for automatically keeping track of how much time you spend on certain tasks, although there is a timesheet app. It requires manual entries, though.

Another feature that I'd like to see added is a suite of PDF and image markup tools built into the viewer. Kanban-style project management tool Volerro provides them, and they're immensely useful for design documents and presentations.

Podio From the Get-Go

Workplace collaboration tool Podio offers a lot for small and mid-size businesses, with its excellent customization options and ease of use. It supports everything from project management to in-office chat to employee praise and recognition. Organizations looking to centralize their work management and communication into one non-email tool can really thrive with Podio, an Editors' Choice service for small businesses.

Before joining PCMag.com, she was senior editor at the Association for Computing Machinery, a non-profit membership organization for computer scientists and students. She also spent five years as a writer and managing editor of Game Developer magazine, ... See Full Bio